The Great Lone Land eBook

in offering to our legislators the example of my friend
the Cree as tending to simplify the solution, or rather
the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation
of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves,
have ceased to love. Whether it was that the
Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his fancy,
or whether he had heard of a war-party against the
Sircies, I cannot say, but he vanished during the
night of our stay in the fort, and we saw him no more.

As we journeyed on towards Edmonton the country maintained
its rich and beautiful appearance, and the weather
continued fine and mild. Every where nature had
written in unmistakable characters the story of the
fertility of the soil over which we rode—­every
where the eye looked upon panoramas filled with the
beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy slope
and undulating woodland. The whole face of the
country was indeed one vast park. For two days
we passed through this beautiful land,-and on the
evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton.
My party had been increased by the presence of two
gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan minister and the
Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company’s
post at that place. Both of these gentlemen had
resided long in the Upper Saskatchewan, and were intimately
acquainted with the tribes who inhabit The vast territory
from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It
was late in the evening, just one month after I had
started from the banks of the Red River, that I approached
the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who looks
back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge
over the long track which he has followed since the
morning, so now did my mind travel back over the immense
distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two
days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire
journey-that distance could not have been less than
1000 miles; and as each camp scene rose again before
me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept prairie
and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something
like infinite space stretched between me and that
far-away land which one word alone can picture, that
one word in which so many others centre—­Home.

Edmonton, the head-quarters of the Hudson Bay
Company’s Saskatchewan trade, and the residence
of a chief factor of the corporation, is a large five-sided
fort with the usual flanking bastions and high stockades.
It has within these stockades many commodious and
well-built wooden houses, and differs in the cleanliness
and order of its arrangements from the general run
of trading forts in the Indian country. It stands